Mamma Mia!, round 2.

"Any film that asks us to imagine the comingled semens of Pierce Brosnan, Stellan Skarsgard and Colin Firth competing in the fallopian tubes of Meryl Streep ought to be at least slightly more compelling than this," notes Glenn Kenny - and 14 further points follow.

"For all its half-hearted stabs at catering to the transatlantic youth market (with a little gift tucked in for the stage show's voluminous gay following), Mamma Mia! is a (Shirley) valentine to fiftysomething, we're-not-done-yet broads," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "The three fiftysomething British broads - director Phyllida Lloyd, screenwriter Catherine Johnson, and co-producer Judy Craymer - who so successfully courted that wildly under-served demographic in the smash-hit stage version of Mamma Mia! came on board the movie with no prior film experience. They haven't a clue, and though their screw-it-all ineptitude lends the movie a sporadically infectious gaiety, basically it's a mess."

Updated through 7/23.

"Lloyd's background as an opera director in England might explain this uncinematic debut (despite many exterior scenes, everything's a mite stagy)," writes Armond White in the New York Press. "But it's even more baffling that the songs are performed as circusy tumbling and broad-faced burlesque.... Essayist Charles O'Brien once outlined musicological parallels between ABBA and Mozart, and he was right to do so. Mamma Mia!'s chirpy songs express many intricate emotional complications through balanced, egalitarian musical epiphanies. 'Gimme, Gimme, Gimme' and 'Does Your Mother Know' say as much about heterosexual affairs as about gay experience. That's why ABBA's catalog joined the disco revolution and eventually influenced the radical pop of Erasure. It's an all-purpose, celebratory template - a high point of modern expression."

"See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind, I'm the first in line. Mamma Mia, here I go again." AO Scott in the New York Times: "Like me, you may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head - and wondering what they were doing there in the first place - but you might as well have been trying to compost Styrofoam. Those shimmery, layered arrangements, those lyrics in a language uncannily like English, those symmetrical Nordic voices - they all add up to something alarmingly permanent, a marshmallow monument on the cultural landscape. When our species dies out, leaving the planet to roaches and robots, the insects will beat their little wings to the tune of 'Waterloo' as Wall-E and Eve warble along."

"Loud, forced, occasionally crotch-grabbingly crude, Mamma Mia! is so fueled by the shrieking-banshee vibe of a drunken hen party that it makes the cafe confabs of Sex and the City girls look like a meeting of the Ms. editorial board," writes Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post. "With Lloyd resolving every scene by raising the pitch ever more hysterically, Mamma Mia! quickly goes from being a sun-splashed, slightly kitschy piece of escapist fluff to an all-out assault. Message: You will have fun. Or else."

"[I]ts employ and utilization of Abba is less accomplished when put alongside Muriel's Wedding," writes Leonard Klady at Movie City News. "That film managed to take the songs and the title character's devotion to them to a level that was funny, heartbreaking and honest."

"Even if the dictates of a profit-loving culture practically mandated the making of a film version of the über-popular stage musical that has been seen by 30 million people in 170 cities worldwide, did they have to turn it into Mamma Mia! The Movie with all the excessiveness that that title implies?" asks Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times.

"Mamma Mia! is a relentless happy-making machine calibrated to beat viewers into submission, and there are times when seems silly to try to fight it," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. That said: "The only showstopper is Meryl Streep's heartfelt rendition of 'The Winner Takes It All,' and not coincidentally, it's also the one time the film introduces a note of gravity to the proceedings. The rest of the time, Mamma Mia! force-feeds bliss."

"Streep has a sweet voice and knows how to use it (although she can't save a song as terrible as 'The Winner Takes It All'), but it's sad to watch a perfectionist remove part of her brain and try to convince us she's having a jolly time," sighs David Edelstein. Also in New York, a shot Brigitte Lacombe snapped on location.

"For a time, the unapologetic, inorganic cheesiness of Mamma Mia! is charming," concedes Jesse Hassenger in the L Magazine. "Unfortunately, that time is far shorter than 108 minutes - after 40, it feels a bit like scarfing an entire bag of Doritos."

"Streep's sunshine carries a lot of charm, although I will never be able to understand her final decision in the movie - not coming from such a sensible woman," writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. "Never mind. Love has its way."

"This movie isn't just unapologetic fluff; it's aggressive, out-loud-and-proud fluff," writes Hank Sartin in Time Out New York. "Just like ABBA."

Aly Semigran recommends it in the Philadelphia Weekly, where you'll also find a review of the soundtrack.

Tina Daunt meets Firth for the Los Angeles Times.

Online listening tip. Matt Singer and Alison Willmore discuss stage and screen cross-pollination.

Earlier: Round 1.

Updates: "There's something pleasing about the day-and-night clash in sensibilities between this weekend's two big movies," notes Dana Stevens at Slate. "In essence, they cancel each other out: the zero-sum, high-stakes, über-masculine gloom of The Dark Knight and the sunny, goofy gynotopia of Mamma Mia!. I admired The Dark Knight enough to return a few days later for a second viewing, but Mamma Mia! is one of the few movies in years that I could have sat through a second time right then."

"I don't normally think of Meryl Streep as the dominatrix type, but watching her and her two BFFs, played by Christine Baranski and Julie Walters, grinning and giggling their way through Mamma Mia! I felt I was being thoroughly, and unenjoyably, punished," writes Stephanie Zacharek. Also in Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams: "What is it about this rather cheesy Scandinavian pop group that sticks in our hearts like hot chewing gum on a summertime pavement? How is it that a group that essentially disbanded in 1982 is still selling upward of 2 million albums a year?... Elisabeth Vincentelli, author of the 33 1/3 series book ABBA: ABBA Gold, says, via e-mail, 'The band has tons of fans among the kind of artists that usually get the kind of 'serious' critical recognition ABBA itself sometimes doesn't get (Elvis Costello, Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields, etc). The songs are incredibly melodic, and their sophistication hides behind apparent simplicity.'"

"I can see how Mamma Mia! might be a fun stage musical," writes Mike Russell. "As a movie musical, it's a train wreck."

"Sing-along versions of this will surely be popular for ages to come," notes Jette Kernion at Cinematical, adding, "Make sure you stay through the first half of the credits at least, or you'll miss one of the best over-the-top numbers in the entire movie, as well as more eye-popping costumes."

Alonso Duralde, writing at MSNBC, notes that "Phyllida Lloyd, the first-time feature filmmaker, constantly puts the camera in the wrong place so as to undercut the musical numbers; she makes the first half-hour all about people hugging and squealing; she sucks the energy out of almost every ABBA song being trounced about by the jukebox musical's cast; and she apparently lacked the wherewithal to stop cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos from shooting a dingy, washed-out movie set in one of the planet's most beautiful corners."

Update, 7/20: "Mamma Mia! may be terrible, but I've never seen a movie embrace its own terribleness as completely as this one does," observes Paul Matwychuk. "I even think it might be terrible by design."

Update, 7/21: "The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take Mamma Mia! to be a useful contribution to that debate," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "In a way, the whole film is a startling twist on the black art of rendition: ordinary citizens, often unaware of their own guilt, are spirited off to a secure environment in Eastern Europe, there to be forced into a humiliating and often painful confession of sins past."

Update, 7/23: "I know I am not supposed to say this, but Mamma Mia! has the exuberance you want out of a summer musical movie," blogs DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice.

Posted by dwhudson at July 18, 2008 7:49 AM